So that’s all right, then. The EU and the UK have agreed that the ‘back-stop’ option will come into place should the two parties find it impossible to come up with a better answer. Bad news, guys: there is no better answer. The can has been kicked down the road and now it’s giving off […]
March, 2018
John Wilson Foster and happiness in The Ulster Tatler
I’m always impressed by people with triple-lock names: John Wesley Harding, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, in the Irish Times this morning, John Wilson Foster. In an article entitled ‘United Ireland campaign is based on a delusion’, he goes on to speak of, among other things, the people whose photographs appear in the Ulster Tatler. I’m […]
How to get ahead in politics
It is a fact and an unfortunate one that when I write about topics beyond our shores, the number of visitors to my blogsite declines sharply. This is unfortunate for two reasons: we should be as outraged over injustice or wrong-doing in other countries besides our own. No man (or woman) is an island, and […]
Must we trim back our Irishness? You must be joking
Last night I was listening (again) to Sam Cooke singing “A Change Is Gonna Come”. It’s got an old-fashioned instrumental opening, quivering and soaring strings throughout, and it speaks to the oppression of the African-American people in the US which continues to this day. Yesterday afternoon I did (for the first time in a looooonnng […]
Noel Whelan tells Sinn Féin what to do
In his article in today’s Irish Times (‘Sinn Féin must end abstentionism’) ( Noel Whelan shows that he’s not very good at counting MPs and even less versed in policies north of the border. Whelan rightly accepts that Sinn Féin cannot end their policy of Westminster abstentionism, since they were elected on an abstentionist mandate. But he urges […]
Did you say it wasn’t Russia? How dare you! Booooh!
Sometimes, when I hear the words that come from the mouths of respected public figures, I want to put my head in my hands and weep. Because they either haven’t a grasp on what constitutes logical argument, or they do have a grasp and choose to ignore it. Yesterday in the House of Commons was […]
Theresa, Sergei and the nerve stuff
How dumb does the British government think people are? Yes I know – there are so many possibilities to choose from, it’s hard to know where to start. I’m starting with Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Sergei, you’ll know, was a British-Russian spy, and when he and his daughter were in Salisbury, they were subjected […]
Mary McAleese, her baby brother and the way we were
Former Irish president Mary McAleese is a woman for whom I have the highest regard. Not only is she highly intelligent, she has a charm to which just about everyone responds, and like Martin McGuinness, that charm comes naturally. Which is why I feel some regret in responding to her recent statement about her “baby […]
Seven questions for consideration before hobnail-booting Barry McElduff
It’s now several months since the Barry McElduff loaf-on-head incident, so you might expect that passions would have cooled and people are ready to look rationally at what happened that night in January. It appears not. According to the Belfast Telegraph a few days ago, Mr McElduff attended Omagh police station voluntarily on March 8, […]
Theresa is talking about an Irish border as similar to a Canada-US border. Is that an attractive prospect?
Every summer from 2002-2007, I taught summer school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. That took three weeks. Each year after my teaching stint was done, I used hire a car and head into the US – sometimes heading west to east, more often heading down the coast through Seattle, San Francisco, Los […]